Challange: Make the USA either Fascist or Communist

Wolfpaw

Banned
The New Deal did fail. You could have it succeed and FDR starts going further and further left, and no one tries to stop him because he got them out of the Depression.

Fail by what standards. Because it worked until Roosevelt tried to rebalance the budget in 37 and sent the economy into another part of the depression.

Which he also got us out of. Well, what preparing for/fighting WWII got us out of, but let's not split hairs :D

I agree with shammy; how did the New Deal "fail"?
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
THREAD NECROMANCY!!!

I have decided to resurrect this thread largely to provide advice to any AH.commers who wish to (without use of a coup) wish to turn the United States into a dictatorship in their own TLs.

In my research for Tail-Gunner (which nobody has commented on in a good long while :(), I have found that in order for the United States to legally/legalistically become a dictatorship, the dictator needs the Judiciary on their side. If the courts (and most importantly the Supreme Court) are in the pocket of the dictator, the Executive will by and large have free reign to do whatever it wills.

I hope this profound or not-so-profound (though perhaps a bit obvious either way) insight has been helpful, or at least saves everybody some researching. Happy power-seizing!:D
 
Last edited:
Hmm, I think there is to much top down thinking and not enough bottom up thinking.

Perhaps a stronger showing by the Bonus Army, with a massive public backlash causing another panic on Wall Street?
 
It's really not too hard to imagine. People forget that there were some very strong right-wing currents in the US in the 20's and 30's. There were large movements that admired what the fascists and nazis were doing. The pledge of allegiance, which was originally said with a nazi-style salute to the flag, came out of this era. The Ku Klux Klan was a huge and powerful organization in the 20's(at it's peak upwards of 3% of the population were members), and some of the first eugenics movements came out of the United States. It was law in several states to sterilize mental patients. There was quite a transatlantic exchange of ideas between American and European fascists, and our treatment of the Native Americans was seen as example for how ethnic minority groups in Europe could be dealt with.

You could have a few important figures in the press and government be a little more sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, and prevent it from being discredited in the mid-20's. Maybe you could have a powerful, charismatic figure take control of the Klan and transform it into a NSDAP-type paramilitary group/political party and take over.

It would be hard to get rid of the official trappings of democracy and our constitutional government, but congress can easily be controlled by bribes, blackmail, threats, and propaganda as our present government proves, or it could just be eliminated as an obstacle by transferring more power to the president as has been done in OTL.
 
Last edited:
There were large movements that admired what the fascists and nazis were doing.

Mostly on the left, believe it or not ;), but we won't talk about that.

This thread is like a land-mine, it involves a whole bunch of very controversial and very political topics, so instead I'll side-step the land mine and point something out: Having your prospective dictators take over the Federal government isn't even the half of it! There are 50 more governments you have to take over before you're really in charge of the country, especially in the decades before WWII.

That's the reason behind why the American republic has been so robust, the Federalism inherent to the system. We get less and less good at it as time goes by, but the state governments are still very important to the running of the country. Without them on your side (and the Federal government effectively can't force them to be on side for things they don't already kind of want to do -- like alcohol age limits, which do have local constituencies, but are pushed over the edge by Federal strong-arming with highway funds), you're not going to get very far.
 
No, silly; they admired what the Communists were doing :p

Not that there's a whole lot of difference between totalitarian systems...:rolleyes:

Yeah, the emphasis has always been on the totalitarian part.

But really, totalitarianism itself illustrates the short-comings of the two-sided political spectrum. Many who would today be considered 'leftists' really did deeply admire Mussolini's Italy. Mussolini himself admired FDR and the New Deal. Eugenics was most popular amongst the Progressives, people who would today be considered left-wing.

I try to avoid speaking in such terms (Left-right) but sometimes it's just a convenient model to use. It's only when we start looking at the extremes that its deficiencies come to fore.
 
Top